Chapter 3: Environment Management

3.1: Working with Environments

We're now going to examine the practical aspects of managing your environments in your Cloud project. It's worth taking a moment to review what we already know about environments:

• Environments exist in a hierarchy and correspond with branches in the Git repository.
• Environments can be active, meaning they are actually deployed into working service containers in Cloud, or inactive, meaning they exist only as a Git branch and entry in the hierarchy.
• Environments can be viewed and managed in the Project Web Interface or with the Cloud CLI tool.
• Cloud project users have varying permissions in specific environments.

We've seen that the initially provisioned environments differ between Starter and Pro plans. If the recommended structure is followed, however, the main hierarchy in either will include Production, Staging and Integration, leaving one more active environment that can be created.

Branching and merging environments (and "syncing" code) correspond with Git operations in the remote repository, as well as affecting your local environment when done with the Cloud CLI tool.

For each topic, we will look at examples using both the Project Web Interface and the Cloud CLI tool.